Geothermal reservoirs to supplement AC? I'm not familiar with this process. Got anything on it?
Wind has its own, well-documented set of problems, not least of which was made fairly well-known by the recent bird-killing lawsuit against the wind generator in California. I'm all for alternate energy forms, if only to help protect me from blackouts. I've been trying for a couple of years to get my parents to put solar panels on their roof, and if I could put up a windmill of my own, I'd use it. Unfortunately, my apartment complex does not like significant engineering projects like that undertaken without their permission.:)
Fair enough points. I know about the towers; there's a good-sized plant in the California desert that's kind of a neat thing to drive by, but they do rely on good access to the sun for efficiency. I'm not so sure they would do as well in, say, New England in February, and even the second site you linked to admits that they're fairly expensive. Tidal generators have thus far proved difficult to get into place cost-effectively, as oceans contain things that cen get into even very-well-sealed machinery. And geothermal energy is very location-specific.
I'm not saying that there isn't some way of efficiently handling this, but for right now, I just don't see it, nor do I see it for some time, much further out than even many skeptics. I really wouldn't be surprised to do a Rip van Winkle and wake up decades from now only to find oil hydrocarbons (from any source, whether wells or TDP plants) still a major source of IC fuel.
It's called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), and it's still in beta, but progressing. I have it on one of my systems, but it's only working on one project right now. Aside from the occasional software update, I've not touched it in a month or two, so I'm not sure if they've implemented any more projects.
What we need is for the government to stay out of it. Let the market decide if it works.
And there's the major question of whether your second process creates more CO2. There was an article in Scientific American in the last couple of months that suggested that a 100% switch to a hydrogen economy might result in increased CO2 production because the energy to crack the hydrogen out of whatever materials has to come from somewhere, and solar power's just not up to the job.
I've been watching this for a while, and to those who in the past have replied to my posts about this deriding it as a lame dream and a waste of time: BOOYAH!:)
If it's commercially feasible, then there will be plenty of other places signing onto this. Perhaps we'll even see an easier way of recycling matter that doesn't involve sorting things out (which makes people not want to do it), and which involves simply shredding the material before it goes into the process. The US alone produces more than 225 million tons of trash per year, of which a bit more than 80% is chemically organic (paper, wood, food waste, plastics, yard trimmings, etc) and would probably benefit from this.
According to a paper at the Changing World Technologies site (which, BTW, calls its own process TCP, so it is a proper name), "Agriculture represents over 50% of the estimated 12 billion tons of solid waste produced each year in the U.S. alone. These 12 billion tons of solid agricultural waste could produce 24 billion barrels of oil if processed through the CWT-TP." That's three times more than the country uses in a year, and a tremendous reduction in the volume of waste. Now, much of that can be reused in other ways, so it's not a complete solution, but factor in sewage treatment and existing domestic oil production of about 10 million bpd, and it leaves the rest of the world the Middle Eastern oil to fight over.
You will, and some others like you will, but we're not the normal users. My parents have been online for almost ten years, and the mail they've kept so far from the same address is something around 50MB or so each. I imagine that most users will fall more towards that side of things.
I have nearly all of my (non-spam) e-mail from the last seven years, and that totals only about 400MB. It's become a marketing point, and perhaps a bit of pride. Google has yet to have to answer to investors (and even when they do, they'll be able to tell them to stuff it in a polite, friendly, Google way since the founders will retain control) whereas Lycos and Yahoo still do. Should the latter two engage in a fight over this kind of thing, they're going to annoy investors who will see past the marketing spiel. Google, meanwhile, can simply continue to increase the e-mail storage size however much they want, because they know that the percentage of people who will come close to even 1GB of e-mail storage is extremely small, and the fraction who would take real advantage of mailboxes larger than a gigabyte is almost infinitesimal.
Part of it is the relative quiet in that part of the world. It's one of the reasons that, since 1991, there has been political pressure in the US to move forces from Germany to somewhere else where they'd be more useful. Any power there willing to try to build up forces for offensive operations would likely be unable to hide significant portions of it, and would thus provide time and reason for surrounding nations to match a buildup. Everyone knows it, and Europe is mostly united in its desire to aquire more money instead of more bullets, so there's little reason for anyone to go on the offensive.
Barring a revival of the Russian bear, there's really not a lot to worry about, and besides, you've got the Finns there to sacrifice themselves for your safety (as has happened on several occasions in the past, IIRC).:)
You and me, both. But I salvaged it with a bit of recycled Slashdot humor, so the original responder seemed satisfied.
Anyway, it will be nice to be able to get back to the old methods of multiple video cards, even if only the highest-end systems will be able to handle them. I really don't see this happening in too many systems based simply on the power draw. nVidia seems to think they can knock the power requirements on the new cards back to needing only a single rail, which is good, but even then the draw is going to be enormous. A 3.06GHz P4 pulls 100W (I don't have numbers for higher, but they're not likely to be any lower), and assuming that nVidia's card can get down to the level of the X800 line (~95W), for a dual-card solution a system will need 300W just to power those, not factoring in any other peripherals. Using an efficiency of roughly 70%, that's a 425W power supply just for those. Throw in a couple of high-performance hard drives, the motherboard, sound card, NIC, and dual opticals, and you're going to be squeezing every last bit of power out of a 550W power supply, if not requiring more.
"Save one life" arguments are specious at best, because they rarely examine the reverse. What if someone were to somehow find out, using this kind of tool, which trails were used the least, and then decide that a lone hiker in the region might be far away from help? Would the avoidance of deploying such a system be validated in that case, because then one life would be saved?
It's a matter of examining both sides, instead of just saying something that feels good. This is one of the reasons we get so many overburdening, overlapping laws, because it feels good to pass them rather than to really take some time to examine what the real cause of something is. Perhaps, on examination, such a system would prove to be better because on balance it would save lives. But to simply decide that it would, and that the saving of a single life would justify deployment of an entire system, is ducking the question.
Most people I know using an SUV for towing are pulling things like boats and RV trailers. Not lightweight stuff, with tongue weights sometimes approaching the equivalent of a small car.
But then, most of the people I know who own pickups also pack them with camping gear and go off for a few days at a time, coming back with dusty or muddy vehicles. Sort of the exception, I guess.
I thought about it, and figured someone would say something about it, but decided I wanted to keep my post serious. I'll compensate by pointing out how a proper implementation would require a Beowulf cluster of Debian boxes so as to be able to pick out CowboyNeal in the crowd of Natalie Portman clones from the background of hot grits.
1. Face detection software identifies faces from background. 2. Face identification software examines multiple aspects, retrieves matching information from database. 3. System plays back critical information into a hidden earpiece. 4. (Optional for those with glasses or ocular implants) System displays known face in field of view for confirmation. An advanced system could do the same thing with multiple faces in a background, adding a name over each person as they're identified, and then providing more detailed information as a person comes closer.
Such a system would be useful in business, social situations, and with individual security personnel. A guard or cop could have this kind of system in place for cross-checking on the ground. An initial scanning system could even locate people and dispatch personnel for final checking up-close before any actions are taken.
It's an interesting question. I suppose it depends on the engagement range, but the debris isn't going to fall straight down. Some of it will, of course, landing in Syria, Jordan, or the Palestinian territories, but some will also continue along roughly the same flightpath, coming down in Israel. Whether it will be enough to do any real damage is questionable, though.
Bonus: make the reflective layer 1 inch thick, and make it boil when heated, and you get ablative armor: it fogs the missle with a clound that blocks the laser.
I'm curious how much weight this would add to the missile, and what that weight would to the resulting range.
Well, what it's most likely to knock down are conventional, biological, and chemical warheads, since only Israel is a known nuclear power at the moment. Iran is likely making a run for the bomb, ducking inspectors when it can. There's a worry that if push came to shove, a few IRBMs might get sent from Iran to Tel Aviv. This may be able to knock them down before they can detonate. It's much easier to clean up the mess from a few radioactive bits than from a detonation.
The problem is beam attenuation in the atmosphere. The longer the distance, the less actual power is delivered on-target. There's also curvature of the earth, which makes the range, even from the ABL, an issue. ICBM's accelerate very quickly, so there's not much time to detect, aim, and destroy the target before it's out of effective range -- if it ever gets into effective range in the first place.
Systems like THEL are battlefield weapons, meant for relatively short range. They're meant to replace Patriot- and Arrow-type systems. ABL is a theater weapon, meant for much longer ranges and much bigger weapons, but still of dubious strategic use when dealing with a launch from, say, the interior of China or Russia. They are of much more use dealing with launches from states like North Korea or Iran.
ATI also holds a comfortable position supplying Rage128 chips to motherboard manufacturers for servers, who have no desire at all to move to more expensive, higher-performance CPUs for boxes that are usually used from the console for no more than a few minutes a week.
I suppose it's partially me getting old and not wanting to futz with stuff, but I'm one of those looking at this. I've managed to run a GF4MX440 for almost two years now, and I got my Athlon 1800 when it first came out. I plan on grabbing an Athlon 3200 in a month or two, plus one of these, plus a gig of RAM, and to run with that for the foreseeable future, at least another 18 months or possibly two years. Should I get an unforeseen windfall, next year I may kick up to an Athlon64, but at this point, I'm seeing that as less and less likely since AMD still has 32-bit Athlons on the roadmap through 2H05, so some small upgrades here and there for CPU and memory should keep me viable for a while with this kind of video card.
Yes, I know that I could probably get away with spending $200 now, and then $200 in a year, but I just really don't want to deal with it. I see myself performing more large-scale, all-at-once upgrades than smaller, bit-by-bit updates.
Some people (myself included) have had trouble with shared resources on that first PCI slot. The AGP cards seem to require fairly dedicated access to them, so other items that also require a lot of access (sound, NIC) can sometimes argue with them, leading to locks and crashes.
Doesn't happen with everyone, but since I've always had the spare room, I've always just moved the cards off so that I had a space between everything.
Personally, I think this very point brings up some questions about nVidia's engineering. If ATI can make a comparable product with a quiet, compact cooling system and lower power requirements, then what is nVidia's design team doing wrong? Or perhaps more to the point, what is ATI doing right?
I'm not an EE, but even I can see where better engineering comes into play. I just bought a new case with a 380W power supply, and I about choked on my soda when I read the 480W recommendation from nVidia (although several sites have since said that this power level is not required). I like my new Antec Sonata case, and do not want to drop another $100+ on a high-end P/S when I still have a CPU, memory, and video card to upgrade for the coming games (D3, HL2, et al). That's close to a grand there (I want a top-o'-the-line card for once), and I can barely afford that.
Re:OT:Slashdot = News.com + 2 days... or more
on
Gmail Addresses For Sale
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
I had one rejected just to show up about 12 hours later (without karma bonus), and I've had another get rejected, only to have it show up a few days later after being submitted by someone else (the Discover mag article about "anything to oil"). Stuff makes little sense here.
Slashdot Mirror
Geothermal reservoirs to supplement AC? I'm not familiar with this process. Got anything on it?
:)
Wind has its own, well-documented set of problems, not least of which was made fairly well-known by the recent bird-killing lawsuit against the wind generator in California. I'm all for alternate energy forms, if only to help protect me from blackouts. I've been trying for a couple of years to get my parents to put solar panels on their roof, and if I could put up a windmill of my own, I'd use it. Unfortunately, my apartment complex does not like significant engineering projects like that undertaken without their permission.
Fair enough points. I know about the towers; there's a good-sized plant in the California desert that's kind of a neat thing to drive by, but they do rely on good access to the sun for efficiency. I'm not so sure they would do as well in, say, New England in February, and even the second site you linked to admits that they're fairly expensive. Tidal generators have thus far proved difficult to get into place cost-effectively, as oceans contain things that cen get into even very-well-sealed machinery. And geothermal energy is very location-specific.
I'm not saying that there isn't some way of efficiently handling this, but for right now, I just don't see it, nor do I see it for some time, much further out than even many skeptics. I really wouldn't be surprised to do a Rip van Winkle and wake up decades from now only to find oil hydrocarbons (from any source, whether wells or TDP plants) still a major source of IC fuel.
It's called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), and it's still in beta, but progressing. I have it on one of my systems, but it's only working on one project right now. Aside from the occasional software update, I've not touched it in a month or two, so I'm not sure if they've implemented any more projects.
What we need is for the government to stay out of it. Let the market decide if it works.
:)
And there's the major question of whether your second process creates more CO2. There was an article in Scientific American in the last couple of months that suggested that a 100% switch to a hydrogen economy might result in increased CO2 production because the energy to crack the hydrogen out of whatever materials has to come from somewhere, and solar power's just not up to the job.
I've been watching this for a while, and to those who in the past have replied to my posts about this deriding it as a lame dream and a waste of time: BOOYAH!
If it's commercially feasible, then there will be plenty of other places signing onto this. Perhaps we'll even see an easier way of recycling matter that doesn't involve sorting things out (which makes people not want to do it), and which involves simply shredding the material before it goes into the process. The US alone produces more than 225 million tons of trash per year, of which a bit more than 80% is chemically organic (paper, wood, food waste, plastics, yard trimmings, etc) and would probably benefit from this.
According to a paper at the Changing World Technologies site (which, BTW, calls its own process TCP, so it is a proper name), "Agriculture represents over 50% of the estimated 12 billion tons of solid waste produced each year in the U.S. alone. These 12 billion tons of solid agricultural waste could produce 24 billion barrels of oil if processed through the CWT-TP." That's three times more than the country uses in a year, and a tremendous reduction in the volume of waste. Now, much of that can be reused in other ways, so it's not a complete solution, but factor in sewage treatment and existing domestic oil production of about 10 million bpd, and it leaves the rest of the world the Middle Eastern oil to fight over.
Imagine FindFast grown oversize, infiltrating the OS, and adding security problems, with about the same usefulness. Voila! You have Indexing Service.
You will, and some others like you will, but we're not the normal users. My parents have been online for almost ten years, and the mail they've kept so far from the same address is something around 50MB or so each. I imagine that most users will fall more towards that side of things.
I have nearly all of my (non-spam) e-mail from the last seven years, and that totals only about 400MB. It's become a marketing point, and perhaps a bit of pride. Google has yet to have to answer to investors (and even when they do, they'll be able to tell them to stuff it in a polite, friendly, Google way since the founders will retain control) whereas Lycos and Yahoo still do. Should the latter two engage in a fight over this kind of thing, they're going to annoy investors who will see past the marketing spiel. Google, meanwhile, can simply continue to increase the e-mail storage size however much they want, because they know that the percentage of people who will come close to even 1GB of e-mail storage is extremely small, and the fraction who would take real advantage of mailboxes larger than a gigabyte is almost infinitesimal.
OK, now that's just sick. /me goes looking for a Mac and a couple of gigs of RAM... :)
Part of it is the relative quiet in that part of the world. It's one of the reasons that, since 1991, there has been political pressure in the US to move forces from Germany to somewhere else where they'd be more useful. Any power there willing to try to build up forces for offensive operations would likely be unable to hide significant portions of it, and would thus provide time and reason for surrounding nations to match a buildup. Everyone knows it, and Europe is mostly united in its desire to aquire more money instead of more bullets, so there's little reason for anyone to go on the offensive.
:)
Barring a revival of the Russian bear, there's really not a lot to worry about, and besides, you've got the Finns there to sacrifice themselves for your safety (as has happened on several occasions in the past, IIRC).
You and me, both. But I salvaged it with a bit of recycled Slashdot humor, so the original responder seemed satisfied.
Anyway, it will be nice to be able to get back to the old methods of multiple video cards, even if only the highest-end systems will be able to handle them. I really don't see this happening in too many systems based simply on the power draw. nVidia seems to think they can knock the power requirements on the new cards back to needing only a single rail, which is good, but even then the draw is going to be enormous. A 3.06GHz P4 pulls 100W (I don't have numbers for higher, but they're not likely to be any lower), and assuming that nVidia's card can get down to the level of the X800 line (~95W), for a dual-card solution a system will need 300W just to power those, not factoring in any other peripherals. Using an efficiency of roughly 70%, that's a 425W power supply just for those. Throw in a couple of high-performance hard drives, the motherboard, sound card, NIC, and dual opticals, and you're going to be squeezing every last bit of power out of a 550W power supply, if not requiring more.
"Save one life" arguments are specious at best, because they rarely examine the reverse. What if someone were to somehow find out, using this kind of tool, which trails were used the least, and then decide that a lone hiker in the region might be far away from help? Would the avoidance of deploying such a system be validated in that case, because then one life would be saved?
It's a matter of examining both sides, instead of just saying something that feels good. This is one of the reasons we get so many overburdening, overlapping laws, because it feels good to pass them rather than to really take some time to examine what the real cause of something is. Perhaps, on examination, such a system would prove to be better because on balance it would save lives. But to simply decide that it would, and that the saving of a single life would justify deployment of an entire system, is ducking the question.
Most people I know using an SUV for towing are pulling things like boats and RV trailers. Not lightweight stuff, with tongue weights sometimes approaching the equivalent of a small car.
But then, most of the people I know who own pickups also pack them with camping gear and go off for a few days at a time, coming back with dusty or muddy vehicles. Sort of the exception, I guess.
Yes, but what has it done for us lately?
I thought about it, and figured someone would say something about it, but decided I wanted to keep my post serious. I'll compensate by pointing out how a proper implementation would require a Beowulf cluster of Debian boxes so as to be able to pick out CowboyNeal in the crowd of Natalie Portman clones from the background of hot grits.
:)
Happy?
Look at it from a stepped approach:
1. Face detection software identifies faces from background.
2. Face identification software examines multiple aspects, retrieves matching information from database.
3. System plays back critical information into a hidden earpiece.
4. (Optional for those with glasses or ocular implants) System displays known face in field of view for confirmation. An advanced system could do the same thing with multiple faces in a background, adding a name over each person as they're identified, and then providing more detailed information as a person comes closer.
Such a system would be useful in business, social situations, and with individual security personnel. A guard or cop could have this kind of system in place for cross-checking on the ground. An initial scanning system could even locate people and dispatch personnel for final checking up-close before any actions are taken.
It's an interesting question. I suppose it depends on the engagement range, but the debris isn't going to fall straight down. Some of it will, of course, landing in Syria, Jordan, or the Palestinian territories, but some will also continue along roughly the same flightpath, coming down in Israel. Whether it will be enough to do any real damage is questionable, though.
Bonus: make the reflective layer 1 inch thick, and make it boil when heated, and you get ablative armor: it fogs the missle with a clound that blocks the laser.
I'm curious how much weight this would add to the missile, and what that weight would to the resulting range.
Well, what it's most likely to knock down are conventional, biological, and chemical warheads, since only Israel is a known nuclear power at the moment. Iran is likely making a run for the bomb, ducking inspectors when it can. There's a worry that if push came to shove, a few IRBMs might get sent from Iran to Tel Aviv. This may be able to knock them down before they can detonate. It's much easier to clean up the mess from a few radioactive bits than from a detonation.
The problem is beam attenuation in the atmosphere. The longer the distance, the less actual power is delivered on-target. There's also curvature of the earth, which makes the range, even from the ABL, an issue. ICBM's accelerate very quickly, so there's not much time to detect, aim, and destroy the target before it's out of effective range -- if it ever gets into effective range in the first place.
Systems like THEL are battlefield weapons, meant for relatively short range. They're meant to replace Patriot- and Arrow-type systems. ABL is a theater weapon, meant for much longer ranges and much bigger weapons, but still of dubious strategic use when dealing with a launch from, say, the interior of China or Russia. They are of much more use dealing with launches from states like North Korea or Iran.
ATI also holds a comfortable position supplying Rage128 chips to motherboard manufacturers for servers, who have no desire at all to move to more expensive, higher-performance CPUs for boxes that are usually used from the console for no more than a few minutes a week.
Q4 is 4-6 months too late for D3/HL2, though, and I *will* be buying those. Trying to play them on a GF4 MX440 is like asking for a nail in my hand.
I suppose it's partially me getting old and not wanting to futz with stuff, but I'm one of those looking at this. I've managed to run a GF4MX440 for almost two years now, and I got my Athlon 1800 when it first came out. I plan on grabbing an Athlon 3200 in a month or two, plus one of these, plus a gig of RAM, and to run with that for the foreseeable future, at least another 18 months or possibly two years. Should I get an unforeseen windfall, next year I may kick up to an Athlon64, but at this point, I'm seeing that as less and less likely since AMD still has 32-bit Athlons on the roadmap through 2H05, so some small upgrades here and there for CPU and memory should keep me viable for a while with this kind of video card.
Yes, I know that I could probably get away with spending $200 now, and then $200 in a year, but I just really don't want to deal with it. I see myself performing more large-scale, all-at-once upgrades than smaller, bit-by-bit updates.
Some people (myself included) have had trouble with shared resources on that first PCI slot. The AGP cards seem to require fairly dedicated access to them, so other items that also require a lot of access (sound, NIC) can sometimes argue with them, leading to locks and crashes.
Doesn't happen with everyone, but since I've always had the spare room, I've always just moved the cards off so that I had a space between everything.
Personally, I think this very point brings up some questions about nVidia's engineering. If ATI can make a comparable product with a quiet, compact cooling system and lower power requirements, then what is nVidia's design team doing wrong? Or perhaps more to the point, what is ATI doing right?
I'm not an EE, but even I can see where better engineering comes into play. I just bought a new case with a 380W power supply, and I about choked on my soda when I read the 480W recommendation from nVidia (although several sites have since said that this power level is not required). I like my new Antec Sonata case, and do not want to drop another $100+ on a high-end P/S when I still have a CPU, memory, and video card to upgrade for the coming games (D3, HL2, et al). That's close to a grand there (I want a top-o'-the-line card for once), and I can barely afford that.
I had one rejected just to show up about 12 hours later (without karma bonus), and I've had another get rejected, only to have it show up a few days later after being submitted by someone else (the Discover mag article about "anything to oil"). Stuff makes little sense here.